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After El Bulli, Spain Looks Forward

Chefs, clockwise, from top left, Ferran Adrià and his team at El Bulli; Quique Dacosta at his eponymous restaurant; Carme Ruscalleda at Sant Pau; and Nandu Jubany at Can Jubany.Credit
Robin Townsend/European Pressphoto Agency (Adrià); Denis Doyle for The New York Times (Dacosta); Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times (Ruscalleda) and Lourdes Segade for The New York Times

EL BULLI, currently the most influential restaurant in the world, will serve its last dinner on July 30. The next morning, Spain’s chefs will wake up to a radically changed universe.

Picture an armada without a flagship, a solar system without a sun, and that is what high-end Spanish cuisine will look like in the absence of El Bulli. In a single generation, it helped transform Spain from a culinary backwater to a world leader, and Ferran Adrià’s cocina de vanguardia (the term he and other chefs prefer to “molecular gastronomy”) became a global obsession among young chefs.

Food as performance art, transformed through wizardry and wit, is now seen as the signature style of modern Spanish restaurants. As Antoní Gaudí transformed the country’s architecture and Pedro Almodóvar its cinema, Mr. Adrià redefined its cuisine. Although many chefs contributed to Spain’s gastronomic revolution, especially Juan Mari Arzak, Santi Santamaría and Andoni Luis Aduriz, it was the sustained daring and smart marketing of Mr. Adrià himself that kept the bar rising.

“It is impossible to say too much about his influence,” said Carme Ruscalleda, a chef in Catalonia who has six Michelin stars to her name, more than any other woman in the world. (She spoke in Catalan; some interviews were conducted through an interpreter.) “He was the first one to tell the chefs of Spain we could think for ourselves.”

Tourists from all over the world now come to Spain for the food, drawn by the mystique of El Bulli, even though only a few hundred managed to eat there each year. Many chefs fear that the closing of El Bulli will combine with European economic woes to create a general plunge in culinary tourism.

“I don’t think it’s a good situation,” said Josep Roca, one of the brothers who own Can Roca, a destination restaurant north of Barcelona. “I am afraid that without El Bulli, a certain energy will disappear from the restaurant scene here.”

But amid the worry, it is also dawning on chefs that the Adrià monopoly on the international press may finally be broken.

“The cuisine of El Bulli and Ferran Adrià has been so huge that it eclipses whatever is beside it,” said Quique Dacosta, an avant-garde chef in Valencia.

During the El Bulli era, millions of euros in private and public funds became available to promote Spanish gastronomy. “Now other chefs will have more opportunities, occupying the spaces that El Bulli and Ferran Adrià will leave,” said Rafael Ansón, the president of the Royal Spanish Academy of Gastronomy, an umbrella group for the country’s multiple culinary promotion and education programs.

Now that El Bulli is going dark (Mr. Adrià says it will operate as a culinary research foundation, at least until 2014), where in Spain will the world’s spotlight shine? Who will be the new darling of the gastro-tourists? Many chefs, including Mr. Dacosta (known for his edible landscapes), Josean Martínez Alija (famous for groundbreaking work with vegetables) and Ms. Ruscalleda, are contenders.

One group plans to keep pushing the boundaries of cuisine with new technologies and global ingredients. Another group is vigorously digging into the roots of Spanish cuisine for traditions that they can elevate, through refinement and innovations, to three-star status.

It is a given that cocina de vanguardia will continue. It is already visible in virtually every high-end restaurant in Spain, and even in modest cafes and tapas bars.

At Si Us Plau, a beachfront cafe not far from El Bulli in the Mediterranean resort town of Roses, the sherry vinegar sprinkled over a plain green salad is gelatinized into tiny, bouncy bubbles. Inside the Boqueria market in Barcelona, Quim Márquez Durán runs a tiny lunch counter, frying the top-quality ingredients stacked on the stalls around him: eggs, artichokes, tiny fish and squid. These days, even his traditional desserts like natilla (cinnamon custard) or mel y mato, soft cheese with honey, are put through a nitrous oxide charger and foamed, à la Adrià.

Not so long ago, any ambitious chef in Spain had to go abroad for culinary education, learning to cook the French dishes that tourists and moneyed Spaniards expected in elegant restaurants. “There truly was no such thing as Spanish haute cuisine,” said the culinary historian Claudia Roden, who has just published an exhaustive cookbook called “The Food of Spain.”

Ms. Roden cited piquillo peppers as a good illustration of Spain’s modern culinary emergence.

Red peppers stuffed with salt cod is a traditional dish in many parts of the country. In a luxury restaurant in 1970, the dish would have been cooked Continental style: blanketed with béchamel and cheese. In the 1980s, once chefs like Juan Mari Arzak and Pedro Subijana introduced the lightened, French nouvelle cuisine to Spain, the pepper’s bright red flesh took center stage, perhaps filled with minutely diced vegetables and set in a pool of puréed herbs. From the 1990s to today, chefs focused on whimsy and technology, transforming the piquillo into a crisp wrapper for a ripe banana; or the pepper itself might be foamed and used to stuff a sphere of salt cod, turning the original dish inside out.

And yet, young chefs like Mr. Dacosta, whose eponymous restaurant is in the province of Valencia, are already exploring new media for cuisine. He is the creator of Oyster Guggenheim Bilbao, a single oyster, heated over juniper wood and draped in a film of edible titanium-silver alloy that mirrors the surfaces of Frank Gehry’s museum. Eating his Animated Forest is supposed to evoke the soil and flora of a Mediterranean woodland.

Paco Morales, the young chef at the nearby Hotel Ferrero, takes a shimmering, jellied tomato water and scatters it with local herbs and shavings of raw vegetables, evoking a Market in a Dish.

Andoni Luis Aduriz, the influential chef at Mugaritz, has coined a term to describe the effect of these edible landscapes: technomotion, a fusion of technology and emotion. (The word “food” is not represented.) “It consists in finding the inspiration in a landscape, and embodying the taste, aroma and sometimes the emotion the place contributed to you,” Mr. Dacosta said.

Mr. Alija, chef at the Guggenheim Bilbao’s new restaurant Nerua, has cured endives with quicklime and stuffs tiny tomatoes with green herbs, surrounding them with a clear golden broth that is the essence of capers. He serves a single white asparagus spear with a gel of cardamom and orange. Like most avant-garde Spanish chefs, he is fluent in the language of ultra-serious artspeak, describing his food as “harmony among space, tastes, smells and textures, distilling the essences of each product.”

Another group has embraced the serious perfectionism of la cocina vanguardia, but not its alien flavors and occasionally unsatisfying weirdness. Nandu Jubany, Victor Arguinzoniz and Mari Carmen Veléz are leaders in a regresar a las raíces (return to roots), using local ingredients and traditional techniques, but refined to an extraordinary level.

As in France and Japan, these Spanish chefs are increasingly worshiping at the altar of terroir: the tiny aromatic Aranjuez strawberries grown outside Madrid, the chickpeas of Fuentesaúco, Atlantic mussels harvested off Galicia.

They are not anti-technology culinary Luddites (though there are still plenty of those in Spain). They are practicing the new cocina de producto, ingredient-driven cuisine, in which the raw materials are paramount, pristine and always recognizable.

Mr. Arguinzoniz, a chef so in touch with the earth that he even makes his own charcoal, has devoted decades to cooking over fire in the Basque country, where grilling is almost a local religion. Once a forest ranger, and entirely self-taught as a chef, he has developed equipment and methods for grilling unlikely ingredients like caviar, whole egg yolks and baby eels. Each mouthful at the elegant Asador Etxebarri — even during dessert — is infused with the taste of fire, but it never becomes monotonous. The salty rasp of a seared steak tastes different from the smokiness in a goat-milk ice cream; wood ash adds crunch to the sea salt in smoked butter. “I do not pretend to break with tradition,” he said. “I am no revolutionary. What broadens my horizons is the day by day, and this is wonderful.”

At Can Jubany in Catalonia, Nandu Jubany has embraced the farm-restaurant model, growing asparagus, tomatoes, peas, herbs and calçots (the Spanish allium that is between a scallion and a leek in size) and raising cows, chicken and ducks. “My eggs are always the perfect shape, spherified in a series, inside a machine called a chicken,” he said, grinning as he showed off the walled garden outside the restaurant.

His food is extremely refined but full of pleasure, often traditional dishes reimagined, like grilled whole pea pods with botifarra, a soft blood sausage, and rice with tiny espardenyes, Mediterranean sea cucumbers. The flavors are clear and concentrated, and rarely more than four to a plate.

The roots of Mari Carmen Veléz, the chef at La Sirena in Alicante, reach not into land but into the Mediterranean: she has worked with seafood since childhood, at her parents’ fish stall. She is famous for suffusing traditional dishes like suquets and arroces with flavor, using tradition rather than technology: for example, concentrated stocks, long marination and emulsions like alioli, made with egg yolks instead of the hydrocolloids favored by the techno-motion crowd.

A loud voice of the back-to-the-land movement was silenced in February by the death of Santi Santamaría, the popular Catalan chef of the three-Michelin-starred Can Fabes in Sant Celoni. Mr. Santamaría was virtually the only Spanish chef to openly challenge Mr. Adrià’s work — calling it unhealthy and, far worse in Spain, dishonorable — in an ideological feud that made headlines for years.

According to Colman Andrews, Mr. Adrià’s biographer, the clash had roots in the Franco regime, when Catalan language and culture were violently suppressed and Mr. Santamaría got his start cooking at underground political meetings. Later, he remained dedicated to preserving Catalan tradition even as Mr. Adrià expanded his palate to include the world.

Xavier Pellicer, who has both traditional and avant-garde credentials and was trained by Mr. Santamaría, has taken over the kitchen at Can Fabes. He is already stirring the pot with creations like a crab crème brûlée with a lid of caramelized sugar and black pepper.

One chef (perhaps the only one) who transcends the rivalries and cliques among Spanish chefs is Carme Ruscalleda, a self-taught, self-employed 58-year-old. Her restaurant on the coast north of Barcelona, Sant Pau, has three Michelin stars; her restaurant in Tokyo, a precise copy of the original, has two; Moments, her restaurant in Barcelona, has one.

Although she is little known outside Spain, within it she is respected as a true artist and fierce perfectionist. “With 70 employees, strict organization is necessary,” she said. “And I am far more strict with the young people, because they have to learn that ‘good enough’ is not good enough.”

She comes by her ingredient-driven cuisine honestly: she grew up working in her parents’ vegetable market in the town where she was born, still lives and cooks. No chef in Spain has closer ties to local farmers and fishermen; her sources are the Mediterranean and Maresme, one of the country’s most ancient, fertile and diverse agricultural areas.

Her food is delicate and minimal, seasonal, and enhanced by the tiny watercolor portraits she makes of each dish, which are printed on the menu. (“We always told her she was really Japanese, even before we opened a restaurant there,” her son, Raúl Balam, said teasingly.) But dishes like a gorgeous, lightly jelled Mondrian made from green almonds, red peppers and olives, and a juicy chunk of roasted foal (horsemeat is not unusual on local menus) are jammed with flavor.

Mr. Balam is a thoughtful and driven chef in his own right. In charge of the kitchen at Moments, he is eager to execute his own dishes, but also feels responsible for maintaining the high culinary stature of his family and his country. “Even with three stars, you cannot relax,” he said. “You have to pretend that there is a fourth star, or else there is nowhere to go but down.”

Whether Spain will descend from the dizzying heights that it has reached during the El Bulli era remains to be seen, but the language of cuisine, both on the plate and on the page, has been transformed by it. When asked whether the faltering Spanish economy will continue to sustain expensive and experimental cuisine in the future, Mr. Dacosta’s answer was characteristic:

“What is expensive? What is experimental? What is the future?”

Where To Find The Newer Faces

Chefs mentioned in the accompanying article, and where they cook. The telephone dialing code for Spain is 34.